Yahoo Wants To Buy Chrome (theverge.com) 72
Legacy search brand Yahoo has been working on its own web browser prototype, and says it would like to buy Google's Chrome if the company is forced by a court to sell it. From a report: The information came out during the fourth day of the Justice Department's remedies trial to rectify Google's search monopoly. The DOJ has -- among other proposals -- requested Judge Amit Mehta break up Google by requiring it sell its Chrome browser, which the agency says is a key distribution channel for its popular search engine that's amassed too much power for anyone else to compete. Yahoo isn't the only company interested in buying Chrome. While DuckDuckGo's CEO said they wouldn't be able to afford it, witnesses from Perplexity and OpenAI both expressed interest in the popular browser on the stand this week. Yahoo obviously isn't worth Chrome's estimated price tag of tens of billions of dollars. So the company is saying that its owner, the hedge fund giant Apollo, will help bankroll the purchase should the opportunity present itself.
I have a better idea (Score:3)
Why doesn't Perplexity buy Chrome? See the previous article.
Re:I have a better idea (Score:5, Insightful)
If Chrome goes up for sale, there'll be a bidding process. Whoever gets it will pay most, and they who pay most will want to get their money back and more.
So it will be a privacy, standards and all other kinds of rape, which we haven't seen even in the worst days of the Internet explorer. It will die, but it will be an epic tale of evil and enshittification.
Re: I have a better idea (Score:4, Insightful)
It will be the end of chrome as a product. Granted, smart people moved off that shit years ago.
Chromium (Score:2)
Not sure I care much about Chrome, but what happens to the open-source upstream browser, Chromium? Will the buyer continue to maintain and release it?
I guess there's always Firefox/derivatives.
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But what will happen then? Firefox has been dying for years and I can't see Mozilla turning it around, or anyone else adopting it. Safari is crap and nobody wants to tie themselves to Apple's mast. Everything else is based on Chrome.
Browsers require a lot of investment to develop, which is one of the reasons that Mozilla is failing with Firefox. There are not many other companies that can throw enough resources at it. Even Microsoft gave up and just adopted Chrome.
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Disagree that Safari is shit. I've been using it exclusively on laptop and mobile for more than a decade, after deciding I couldn't take any more of Chrome's shitness. That was even before I decided I didn't like Google's privacy stance.
There are more reasons that Mozilla is failing with Firefox. The wrong people running the show and developing it are probably bigger factors. I stopped using it when they couldn't get their shit together about a process per tab, even when every other major browser was al
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Safari is shit because of vendor lock-in. When there are multiple alternatives that works on all platforms (such as Chrome, Firefox, most browsers), it is foolish to chose the only one which works only on products made by a single vendor.
You should be avoiding Apple products to begin with, but if you aren't, at least you should be using as little Apple software/services as possible (not use Apple mail, iCloud, etc.). Safari is likely one of the easiest Apple software to avoid.
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I use Firefox and the sad thing is that it's actually a pretty good browser on desktop.
The two big issues at the moment are that quite a few sites break with it because they were only tested with Chrome and derivatives, and that the Android version is still quite weak. Now to be fair the Android version does finally seem to be getting to a decent state. Some stuff is still painful like tab management, but for the most part it's usable, compatibility issues aside.
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the Android version is still quite weak.
I've used Firefox Beta exclusively on my Android phone for several years and just don't see this. Yes, there's the rare occasion that a site doesn't work correctly because, as you say, it was created with only Chrome in mind, but that's hardly Firefox's fault.
There's room for improvement and change seems to come slower to Firefox on mobile, but I think it does a very good job. And the fact that you can use addons with it, including ad-blockers, is a huge boon.
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My experience has been similar, been running firefox on various androids since there were only nightlies available, and on slow phones. It had problems at first, but I haven't experienced a glitch in a long time.
The only place it kinda sucks at times are e-ink devices, but every browser sucks there at least as much, even EinkBro.
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If you think that FF on desktop is good, you might be suffering from Stockholm Syndrome. The UI is an abomination. It's actually better on macOS than other platforms because it has a real menubar. But why oh why did they get rid of the ability to change a page's text encoding? That's one of the ways I have using Safari on macOS to post content that isn't UTF-8 to /.
You complain about Android being weak. How do you think an iOS version will hold up? It'll only be a niche product, especially if it drain
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On Windows if you press the alt key you get the menu bar. I never use it though.
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process per tab was and is a shitty hack, it boiled down to we can't get our code to stop leaking and crashing all over the place so lets just fob the problem off on process isolation.
Sure it works, for machines that have lots of memory (which is just about everything now) but when the whole process per tab thing started it really hit a lot of what had been perfectly usable systems for web browsing very hard, performance wise.
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Maybe for Chrome, but Safari was lighter weight. One of the reasons I originally switched from Chrome to Safari. At the time, a crash in FF using one page brought down the whole browser.
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Firefox has flushed somewhere around 20 Billion USD down the drain during it's lifetime... mostly paid for by Goog.
I have a hard time believing anyone got 20 Billion of value.
Firefox exists only to "prove" Chrome isn't a monopoly, afaict.
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I will continue using Firefox as long as I can use uBlock Origin, NoScript and others. The web is not usable to me without.
It's had some bumps along the road but nothing enough to make me switch to an ad company's offering as my primary.
Re: I have a better idea (Score:1)
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- Firefox works just fine, thank you, despite Mozilla's Managements efforts to divert money into fad-of-the-week.
- Seeing development of web browsers trail off could actually be a good thing. It's impossible to keep up, and all it's doing is breaking things rather than providing real world improvements.
Honestly, I'd like to see all three major engines right now see a bleed out of development resources, with those left focusing on bugs and ensuring what remains to be implemented to be compatible with each ot
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I appreciate you have criticisms of Firefox for specific use cases, but I bet you can list a shit load for the same or other use cases with Chrome or Safari. I certainly can.
I must admit also to not understanding your argument about certificates. My employer filters everything through it's own firewall and forces its own CA on everything, and Firefox has never needed me to manually update a single certificate after any automatic update (actually, ever.) Is it possible you're just doing it wrong?
Yahoo are still around? (Score:4, Informative)
I thought they'd vanished with AOL, Geocities, MySpace etc a decade or more ago.
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Verizon bought AOL and Yahoo, which only made things worse.
Chrome will become as great as Altavista ! (Score:4, Insightful)
You haven't heard of Altavista ?
Exactly.
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Um... what if I have heard of Altavista (and actually used it)... I guess that makes me too old to deal with this modern (enshitified) world. Of course, Altavista was a pioneer in enshitification so it might be appropriate if its current owner purchases Chrome and does the same.
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Webcrawler was big back in those early days too.
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Altalavista, baby! (Score:3)
Actually, Altavista was OK for its time and Yahoo mail is quite useful.
As for Chrome, well, Firefox works just fine.
Dont sell Chrome (Score:3)
Re: Dont sell Chrome (Score:2)
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Why? What is the public interest of doing this? And by public interest, I do not mean your personal interest.
And what reason would we have to believe that an organization of your choice would remove code you don't like or that they would be capable of making a "better and more secure browser"? Your post is pure dogma.
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Chrome going from one for-profit advertising company to another for-profit advertising company is not doing the âoepublic interestâ any good either
"Public interest" has become a codeword in the modern age. It now means, "most profitable outcome." FOSS would not immediately lead to profits for someone, so is no longer in the public interest.
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thats a slippery slope = public interest > for profit > enshitification (that went down hill real quick)
The entirety of society seems to be focused on precisely this path. It's not that the slope is slippery on its own, it's that most seem convinced that the best way to slow down the pathway to enshitification is to pour barrels of oil on it.
Public Interest (Score:2)
Having a well-maintained reference implementation that doesn't favor particular owners or markets doesn't do all the work, but it is a big part of the strategy of a lot of long-lived, well-behaved internet protocols.
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Even more advertising (Score:3)
Google is already twisting the thumb screws and trying to salami-tactic more and more advertising and less ad-blocking into Chrome, but under yahoo this would definitely be a whole new dimension of hurt.
apple needs to be forced to sell safari or allow a (Score:1)
apple needs to be forced to sell safari or allow any web browser (full) on ios.
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Other browsers ought to be allowed on the platform, but I really think it would be a bad idea to force them to sell. The ONLY way to make money off an independent browser will be via advertising. Apple doesn't need that revenue stream (their way to make money is to at least pretend to be better than the others at privacy - making money indirectly by giving people a reason to stick with their hardware). It's nice that at least one browser has a non-advertising reason to be funded.
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Apple makes money off Safari the exact same way - by selling access to Google.
Yup. Google basically funds all web browser development at this point, with the exception of whatever limited app-specific window chrome/menu bar/bookmark/history development goes into Brave, Edge, and other third-party Chromium wrappers.
And this is also why breaking Chrome away from Google would be a huge mistake. The best-case scenario is that it becomes another externally Google-supported browser, and nothing changes meaningfully. The worst-case scenarios are that Android becomes nonfunctional because
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No thanks. I'm happy with Safari and I don't want to be forced to use other crap on my Macs and iPhones. I value my privacy, battery life and cross-device integration. Opening up Apple systems like this isn't in the interests of me as a user but rather in the interests of those who want my data and to monetise it, which is precisely what I'm trying to escape from with Apple.
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Nobody is forcing you to. But you should have the choice of using Firefox if you want to (and Mozilla wants to release Firefox for iOS of course). And I am not talking about a Safari skin labeled as Firefox, but a real browser not using the Safari engine at all.
If Safari is so good anyways, Apple shouldn't have to fear competition, isn't it?
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Mozilla adding another Firefox platform? Talk about spreading themselves too thinly. It's a dying product.
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It would be their choice. It SHOULD be their choice. Apple shouldn't be allowed to dictate which web browser engine can be used on an iPhone.
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No thanks. I'm happy with Safari and I don't want to be forced to use other crap on my Macs and iPhones.
I suppose you also don't want gay marriage because you're not gay, you don't want your pizza place to sell pizzas with pineapple because you don't like pineapple on pizza, etc.?
Nobody is suggesting that Apple should force users to have multiple browsers installed. What we're suggesting is that Apple should be forced to allow users to install other browsers if they choose. It is safe to say that no matter what, the browser that comes on the device will always be used by a rather large percentage of users,
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It's not Apple that's the problem, but lazy devs who only test on Chrome and its view of the how HTML should work. Don't you remember what it was like when Microsoft had a browser monopoly?
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It's not Apple that's the problem, but lazy devs who only test on Chrome and its view of the how HTML should work.
No, it's really not. There are bugs that I filed against Safari more than a decade ago that are showstoppers for some of the web apps that I've written, and are still not fixed (even though I spent a decent amount of effort building a not-quite-working, crashes-occasionally patch that fixes the problem about a decade ago). Those same bits of code work on Chrome and Firefox.
Yes, lazy devs can be a problem, but when parts of the DOM support do not work the way they are supposed to, you're asking a lot of we
What? (Score:2)
Yahoo exists?
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I knew it exists and from what I heard is yahoo is very popular in Japan. My question is "Yahoo has the funds to buy chrome ?".
I would think the price for chrome would be far more than what yahoo could afford.
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The article states that the parent company of Yahoo! would provide the funding.
Too much focus on the browser (Score:2)
What really needs to be divested is the Android OS and its associated apps, web store, etc.
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Funny (Score:1)
Can a judge force Google to sell Chrome, if Google says, "not for sale, we will just discontinue the product" ?
If would be funny if Google takes the position that if it can't have it, then nobody can.
Almost as funny if Google offers it to Apple at no charge.
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if it can't have it, then nobody can.
Well, there's always Chromium. That's open source and, although I'm not familiar with the details of the license, what's to stop someone else from picking up the source and running with it?
Why anyone would actually want Chrome is beyond me. I've seen a number of web sites with "This site may not work properly with Chrome" notices. Including a few of our state's .gov sites. Of course, Washington is Microsoft territory, so sabotage isn't out of the question.
Edge is Chromium based, so the broken stuff is eit
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Yeah, Chromium is sufficiently complete that MS can brand it as Edge without any significant effort.
Thus, I find it ludicrous the notion that Chrome can be bought or sold. Unless there's a heap of 'special sauce' in the closed source bits of Chrome then all you'd be buying is the programmer resources within some Google office, which is going to cost the new owner a heap in salaries.
When/if Alphabet are coerced into divestment, please shove it in a 'Linux foundation' style arrangement because I sure as hell
Ya... who? (Score:2)
Ya... who?